Machine Dreams (21 page)

I
can’t reconstruct things enough to know when I decided. I guess it seems I was working toward the divorce for years, but I was only trying to get to the point where I could support myself. I never even considered divorce—not with kids at home. Maybe I stopped thinking on purpose during those years and lived in the day-to-day. No struggle because every minute was filled.

I try to remember. A few separate days, isolated from each other by months or years, swim up. Then I have to think hard to know what years those were. I know immediately how they
felt
, the weather, the news. How old you and Billy were, your teachers in school, clothes you wore. Your face and Billy’s face—exactly how you looked.

You know, I don’t remember my own face then. I didn’t really see myself. Just the slash of red lipstick and a comb through my hair. There are no photographs of me with you kids from the time you were old enough to be photographed without me. Every year
there were school pictures with my first-grade classes, and I always threw them away.

I went back to college when Billy was in kindergarten and took a full course load, but nothing changed at home. I did all the housework and meals and put you kids to bed with stories, then stayed up till two or three reading and memorizing. Long nights, with all the house in darkness and one light burning over the kitchen table. I’d hear sounds outside and the breathing of sleepers.

I’d always been afraid of being alone, but now there was no fear or wondering. I
was
alone, though not surprised, not bitter. My mother had been alone, hadn’t she, except for me? I’d borrowed the money to pay for classes and wanted to get straight A’s, a perfect record. The one time I got a C on a mid-term, I sat in the rocker in my bedroom and wept. I remember you standing there, trying to reason with me, being very grown-up at eight years old. I suppose my nerves stayed frayed until the degree was finished, and never a word of encouragement from Mitch. No blowups, no fights; he knew it was important I start earning an income, but he grew more silent.

We never fought much. Once, I remember having to stand up to him.

What year was it? The news was full of scary headlines about Cuba, and Mitch maintained we’d never be in this fix if a Catholic hadn’t been elected president. People around town were talking about fallout shelters. The VFW organized a Civil Defense League: classes at the post office one night a week for four weeks. Mitch took them in the summer, when those old rooms must have been airless. Then he taught the same class in September. He was working for a construction company then, selling aluminum buildings on commission. Always yelling at you kids,
Get the hell off the telephone! Don’t you know I earn a living on this phone?
Things were easier when he was involved in the civil defense work; there were books and pamphlets and construction details. Which basements were to be used for town shelters: the courthouse, the high school, all the churches.

It would have been October, and grainy aerial photographs of Cuban missiles were appearing in the newspapers. People were
alarmed and news was broadcast on the hour. I didn’t care much; I remember thinking myself strange. I spent eight hours a day with six-year-olds bused fifteen or twenty miles from hollows back in the country. Did they have fallout shelters? They didn’t have mittens or winter coats unless I could find enough at the Salvation Army. Civil defense seemed crazy to me but it was important to Mitch, so I kept quiet. He talked about building a shelter in the little room behind the garage, a utility room where he kept tools, where the hot-water tank was, and the big cabinet that held canned goods. A ladder up the wall led to the attic door, which had to be shoved open from underneath. You kids were never allowed in the attic—there was no floor except for a narrow walkway, just insulation between the boards. Every change of season, I’d find myself up there, opening Mother’s big cedar chest in a corner under the eaves. Packing woolens away with moth balls or shaking out summer cottons, hoping they weren’t all outgrown.

That night, I was in the attic, trying to find enough winter school clothes. Dresses with big hems, pants to let out, but there would have to be new boots and coats. I had a whole pile of woolens and thought I’d get you both to try everything on while I finished ironing a basket of Mitch’s shirts, and my blouses. Teaching, I wore skirts and those Ship ’n’ Shore cotton blouses with roll-up sleeves and Peter Pan collars; two white ones, a pale green one, a blue one. Those are the details I remember, colors and clothes and the smell of chalk at the blackboard, going over your homework at night—the red arithmetic book Billy had in the sixth grade called
Fun with New Math.
No questions about the meaning of things; you don’t think that way if you have children. The meaning is right in front of you and you live by keeping up with it.
I have my house and my children
was a phrase I kept in mind. Piling up clothes, I calculated which would do and which wouldn’t. The light in the attic was dim, one bulb glowing and the sun setting outside with a gold tinge. Underneath that yellow color was the cold of the fall coming on. It was a Sunday night because I was thinking I had the week’s lesson plans to do, and thirty-five big jack-o’-lanterns to cut from orange construction paper. I loved decorating that classroom and spent hours on a
different display every month. Just that day I’d gotten two big rolls of brown paper so the kids could trace each other’s shapes and color their own portraits. I could put the shapes up all around the room, with the movable arms and legs holding vowel sounds, and the jack-o’-lanterns for heads, each with a different expression. In October I was still teaching letter recognition to kids from the country who hadn’t seen many books, kids who’d never seen themselves full length in a mirror. At Halloween, a third of the class would be too poor to have costumes; I could take staples and elastic string to school to make masks out of the jack-o’-lantern faces. I’d ask Bess and Gladys for worn-out linens again, and use torn sheets for capes. I stood there in the attic with all these plans, looking at shirts I knew Billy couldn’t wear; in the half-finished top of the house, I felt as though I were standing behind the scenes of some production. I couldn’t move for a minute, the feeling was so strong. Nothing seemed real. I thought of my mother hemming my dresses on the porch, letting down hems one after another while I sat playing with soap bubbles, a skinny dark sparrow of a kid.

I heard Mitch walking on the concrete floor below. He tapped with his pencil on the water tank, a small reverberating sound that echoed itself. I looked over the edge of the attic opening and saw him figuring on a tablet, holding his OCD manuals and a tape measure. He wore the same khaki clothes at home that he’d worn at the plant, before Clayton died and the business was sold. Now he wore shirts and ties to work and called on customers; I think he hated selling. Too proud not to resent doing it, and at his age. He must have been fifty. I was thirty-five, but I didn’t feel young. Looking at him from above, I felt so distant I could have been watching from another planet. He stood inspecting the door to the patio, so involved he was unaware of the light on over his head. He turned abruptly and strode away into the garage.

I stepped back, switched off the light, and took up the bulky clothes in the dark. The ladder was difficult. I held on with one hand and was halfway down when I got stung. Hornets always nested in the attic in summer, but I’d supposed they were gone by now. It was ludicrous; I wasn’t willing to drop the clothes on the dirty floor and then sort them all again, and I couldn’t move
my hand. I called to Mitch but he must not have heard. So I climbed down while the hornet kept stinging me, unable to see over bundled wools and corduroys, and walked into the kitchen where I could put them down.

My hand felt as though it were on fire; there would be some welts. Mitch came in and I stepped behind the heaped ironing board to give him room in the narrow kitchen.

He put a list on the table. “I can make an airtight shelter back there—rig up an air-pipe vent and hand pump through one of the windows, then brick them up with cement block. We’ve got the water tank we could siphon to supplement the containers, and I’ll need about a hundred sandbags to block the doorways.”

“Isn’t there room for us in the town shelter? We’re only two miles away.”

“They recommend having your own if you can.” He put the manuals on the ironing board in front of me. “You need to read these.”

“How can we afford—”

He nodded once. “I’ll need your help on this.”

What he meant was money. I looked down at the booklet and saw a gray and yellow illustration of a man shoveling dirt onto a door. The door was propped at an angle against an outer wall. His sweater and the dirt were yellow, as though he were already covered with dust.
A Plan But No Time: Pile the dirt from the trench on top of the doors.
I scanned the words, not really seeing them.
Try to get in a shadow; it will help shield you from the heat.
The ironing board was piled high and the supper dishes were still on the table; my hand was throbbing and I felt almost dizzy with frustration. I turned a page and read:
Time But No Plan: Fill buckets, sinks, a bathtub, and other containers with water.

“I can’t read these,” I said, “I’ll be up until midnight as it is. And the kids need coats this month. I can’t give you any help.”

For a minute he just looked at me. Then he leaned toward me over the ironing board. He was a lot bigger than me and seemed huge. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “I should know better than to expect help from you on a goddamn thing.”

The door to the breezeway was behind me, but I wasn’t going to turn around and leave my own house. “You’ve got no right to
talk to me like that. For your information, I’ve paid half the bills in this house and bought all the kids’ clothes for two years.”

“And don’t you think you’re goddamn great for every penny you’ve spent!”

So we started. You remember his short fuse—breathing heavily and shaking with rage in seconds. That’s probably why he never raised a hand to you and left all the discipline to me—he got too angry to trust himself. I think I shoved the ironing board against him to get out from behind it. Then we were walking back through the house, just shouting. I was trembling but knew enough not to move too quickly; almost by instinct, he would have reached out and grabbed me.

I realized I was headed toward the back room, our bedroom, and I walked into the bathroom and locked the door.
You’d better stay the hell in there
, he yelled. There was silence except for his voice. I imagined you and Billy in your rooms, listening. I heard you open your door ever so quietly and knew you were afraid.

I told him clearly,
I don’t have to stay anywhere. There are laws to protect me from men like you.
The words came out of my mouth as though I’d had them in my mind all along. Later I wondered if I’d heard my mother say them to my father.

You say I planned for years, but there was no plan. He was earning less and less; I had to earn more and more. All those extension classes and summer courses to get the master’s, almost a doctorate, then insisting we put that house on the market and move into town when you kids were in high school. Finally he agreed. You know, I told him I’d move out alone if he’d sign an agreement to pay for your college educations. But I would never have left you. I was only gambling.

I couldn’t take it anymore, struggling on his ground.

D
anner’s family sat in two rows of folding chairs on the wide sidewalk. The parade always passed Bond Hospital and Great Aunt Bess’s house at the very beginning, having formed on vacant lots out by the Tastee Freez, where there was room for all the floats to park. Bess sat on the white porch swing under the awning with Aunt Katie; they stayed back from the street so that Katie was out of the sun, but the cousins and the men and nearly everyone stood or sat in the heat. The women wore sunglasses shaped like wings whose transparent frames were pink or blue; Danner’s mother wore a red scarf over her black hair. On the high porch of Bond Hospital there were chairs and gliders drawn up for the ambulatory patients, and they began to drift into place guided by nurses. Bess didn’t own the hospital anymore and said it had gone down, just an old folks’ home, but Danner waited every year to see the patients in their long robes. The old people weren’t erectly tense like Bess but seemed weightless, nearly translucent, their skin purely white
and their wild hair gauzy. An hour into the long parade, noise and confusion and blasting horns an unremitting din, they fell asleep sitting up, their hands in their laps. Heads fallen back, they dreamed with their mouths wide open.

The air smelled of heat and candy and the parade was heard far off, an invisible blare of cornets and the double-time pounding of drums. Scores of boots clicked taps on pavement, and Danner felt the waiting street shimmer. Candy coins thrown by children were already melting in their gold foil; when the bands fell out at the end of the route, breaking formation past the stone gates of the city park, their bulky uniforms would smell of trampled chocolate and sweat. Danner could almost smell them, when suddenly a first corps of majorettes swung into sight under the big trees of East Main. Their bronzed legs flashed and the crowd rippled, standing and shuffling, raggedly cheering as the girls saluted. The drum majorette wore a tall white fur helmet strapped to her head with a silver strap; behind her the others advanced in perfect double lines, the short skirts of their white uniforms starched nearly horizontal and buoyed by layers of red net crinolines.

These were the Bellington girls from the hometown band, always first in line. The majorettes were the same girls who danced at the pool dances and sat in boys’ cars at Nedelson’s Parkette, but now they were other-worldly and startling. Gazing straight down the center of the street that wound past the hospital through town to the fraternity houses and mansion funeral homes of Quality Hill, they smiled the same set, perfect smile. College boys would watch them from balconies hung with rebel bunting; watch them, not applauding.
Do you know they set a girl’s hair on fire at the May Day Sigma Chi party? Yes, last week.
In the dank basement of the junior high school, girls had stood by rows of battered olive green lockers and speculated. The lockers were ancient, like the rest of the building; Danner’s parents, even her father, had gone to high school in the same rooms and hallways. Now there was a new high school just outside Bellington, with a big parking lot where town boys parked their cars.
She was lucky they put it out before her face was burned.
Who put it out?
Danner, how should we know? What a stupid question
, and her eighth-grade compatriots turned away. Danner,
reaching into a cluttered metal shelf, found the rouge and the Maybelline eyeliner pencil she kept hidden beside her tattered notebooks; after third period, before noon hour and bag lunches in the gym, she went to the girls’ basement bathroom and lined her eyes while the plumbing hissed. Here in the June sunlight of the festival parade, school seemed to have ended years ago. Danner remembered her own surreptitious face, shadowed by yellowish lights of the low cement ceiling and reflected in the cracked mirror. Lined in black, alive in the empty, cell-like room, her eyes had seemed the eyes of an animal. She thought she looked older than she was, but in a secretive, evil way. She didn’t belong to her own face; except for her womanish hips, she was skinny and gawky, too tall; her straight brown hair wouldn’t curl. She had a reputation for being smart. Boys her age wouldn’t talk to her much; she didn’t know how to make the kind of conversation they liked. Mornings before classes, older boys from the country had to change school buses to get to the high school; they waited on the massive stone steps of the junior high. They scared Danner; they were like men, big and grown, with shadows on their faces and big hands like her father’s hands. They had no money for cars or they wouldn’t be riding the buses; they wore shabby coats and laced-up farmers’ boots, combed their oily hair forward and then back in out-of-style pompadours, smoked cigarettes in defiance of the rules. Danner walked past them, up the worn steps to the big double doors of the school, stealing glances at their mysterious faces. Always, they were watching her, their expressions guarded, sullen, angry. What did they know about her? No one else ever paid any attention.
Hey
, they sometimes said, softly, appraisingly. Their smiles were sneers. Though she dressed like a girl from town—in penny loafers, full skirt, ankle socks—they watched her openly. She was ashamed and lowered her eyes; the boys looked away then and continued talking as though she were invisible. She heard phrases, snatches of words, as she passed.
How many times she give it up?
or
dead before you know it.
Who was dead? Most of them joined the Army or the mines as soon as they turned eighteen. You never saw them except on the steps—not at dances or the movies, or at the carnival in summer,
not at the festival parade.
Son of a fucking bitch
and
she found a train to pull.